Plainwell is the airport just south of me. I recognized the rudder pedals in the wreckage pictures and was afraid that it was an RV. Very sad.

Plainwell has a short narrow east/west runway between two roadways and an intersecting turf runway midfield. Nothing much else to say about the airport environment other than there should be any number of fields around it to try to land on. And roadways. Michigan is about half open fields and half woods. Weather was beautiful yesterday.
 
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From a close mutual friend of the pilot/builder of this RV, he said it was a stall/spin type of accident.
 
Witnesses

msturgis said:
I'm not trying to sound rude... But seldom do ground witnesses get it right, even more so when it comes to the engine.
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Matt, there isn't anything rude about trying to find out what happened. It is important the we all learn from unfortunate events like this one.

From the small amount of hard evidence, and an educated guess, it does look like a stall-spin, all the wreckage in one spot and no marks leading to the impact site. And no, an engine failure won't directly cause a stall/spin, but running out of airspeed sure will.

John Clark ATP, CFI
FAAST Team Member
EAA Flight Advisor
RV8 N18U "Sunshine"
KSBA
 
Nothing will be learned from reading errant news articles or speculating on this forum. If someone has access to the NTSB report, when it becomes available, they can convey it to this site. Then we can intelligently discuss how to avoid situations that lead to accidents. In the mean time, please limit your posts to expressing sympathies to the families and friends of the victims.

Roberta
 
Reality is that nothing will be learned from this accident if the causal factor was one that kills every year.

As an RV community we could develop a safety program that reinforces the common factors that lead to accidents with the goal of substantially reducing them. I brought up this idea in the safety forum and it got ZERO response.

So we will continue to see RV people killed from preventable causes.

Sad, but true.
 
Hi Ron,
I am in favor of a safety program. How would we go about setting one up?
I wonder if there is a simple stall warning device available that could work for RVs? Seems like it could really help save lives. Maybe a moderator will move this over to the safety forum and you can try again.
 
Tom, there are probably existing safety programs from people like Cirrus. Obviously if you copied the general outline from them you would have to remove all references to "Pull the red handle."

AOPA has a lot of online courses that could be used as the basis of a program. Take those, get the certificates, then have periodic sessions where people are exposed to and discuss the real reasons that people die.

These are not new causes nor are they hard to prevent. While hardware/electronic devices may help in some cases, my gut feeling is that almost 100% of the preventable accidents can be stopped by increased awareness by the pilot. It really boils down to the pilot. Some is education. Some is attitude. Some pilots are destined to die. We can't expect to cut accidents/fatalities to zero.

Imagine a self-administered safety program that reduces accidents and fatalities by 25-50% in 3-5 years. Perhaps a lofty goal, but what if we were successful?
 
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We can contribute...

...as Ron says. Just yesterday, I saw a gentleman through his training and a big part of that was airspeed/attitude awareness.

I sometimes feel as if what I say on here falls on deaf ears only to be told later on that..."I remembered what you said about...xxxx" and the satisfaction returns.

We have many highly experienced pilots/engineers/ATP's on here who can contribute a lot to the safety of the guys/gals who read this forum.

Let's keep safety of flight and other issues on the forefront.

Regards,
 
=pierre smith;328277Let's keep safety of flight and other issues on the forefront.
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I agree. Stall/spins and flight into terrain, are always on my mind. With a lot of years of R/C flight, I could see the firsthand effects of stall/spin many times. It's implanted in my mind. And in our area of the mountain west, we still get pilots flying into mountains. A fire fighting aircraft just did it a few weeks ago, while traveling from Montana to New Mexico. Scud running, when they should have just waited the weather out. I read the NTSB reports, hearings on various accidents, and the conclusions all the time.

L.Adamson --- RV6A
 
stall warning

rvator51 said:
...I wonder if there is a simple stall warning device available that could work for RVs? Seems like it could really help save lives. ...
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There are a few on the market that seem to work very well, like those from AFS, Dynon, and LRI.
 
rvator51 said:
I wonder if there is a simple stall warning device available that could work for RVs? Seems like it could really help save lives. Maybe a moderator will move this over to the safety forum and you can try again.
Click to expand...

The best stall warning in the world is the airspeed indicator. When things happen (big fan stops) pilots panic and forget to fly the airplane. We may practice gliding by pulling power, but usually never shut the engine off. When we loose power totally the glide rate / factor is not the same. Even at idle the engine is producing power.

Airspeed is everything, fly the airplane.
 
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robertahegy said:
Nothing will be learned from reading errant news articles or speculating on this forum. If someone has access to the NTSB report, when it becomes available, they can convey it to this site. Then we can intelligently discuss how to avoid situations that lead to accidents. In the mean time, please limit your posts to expressing sympathies to the families and friends of the victims.

Roberta
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Absolutely right. I appoligize if I contributed to thread drift here.

My deepest sympathies to the family and friends who have suffered a loss.
 
Ron Lee said:
Reality is that nothing will be learned from this accident if the causal factor was one that kills every year.

As an RV community we could develop a safety program that reinforces the common factors that lead to accidents with the goal of substantially reducing them. I brought up this idea in the safety forum and it got ZERO response.

So we will continue to see RV people killed from preventable causes.

Sad, but true.
Click to expand...
The big problem with safety programs is that people who need them the most are the ones who are least likely to take part. So even the best safety program can only hope to have a very marginal impact on accident rates. Sad, but true.
 
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